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 Afterword Reflections on Interpreting Oral History All human beings are practicing historians. As we go through life we present ourselves to others through our life story; as we grow and mature we change that story through different interpretations and different emphasis. We stress different events as having been decisive at different times in our life history and, as we do so, we give those events new meanings. People do not think of this as “doing history”; they engage in it often without special awareness. We live our lives; we tell our stories; it is as natural as breathing. Gerda Lerner As I said at the outset, oral histories are really stories—stories about the way individuals and groups lived in the past. We are all familiar with stories. Stories are the narrative devices people use to describe significant experiences and explain their meanings. We grow up listening to stories—about Little Red Riding Hood and the Wizard of Oz, for example. We read stories in books. We know that some stories are true—in the sense that they describe actual events—and others are “made up”—that is, they are narratives about events created in someone’s imagination. We quickly learn that stories are ways of embedding details about events in an interpretive framework . Using stories, we make sense of events that might otherwise seem random to a listener or a reader. By telling stories, we pass our individual and family histories on to others.1 Thinking of oral histories as stories reminds us of some of the challenges inherent in studying the past through oral history. We would prefer to think of oral narratives as pure recall—an accurate retelling of exactly what happened in the past. But upon reflection, we realize that Alessandro Portelli’s conception of oral history as a set of stories embedded in the “knot of memory and imagination that turns material facts into cultural meanings” is more useful.2 For memory is not pure recall. Memories contain distortions, 190 Afterword omissions, rearrangements, and occasionally outright fabrications. As any police officer will tell you, memory is fickle, and the longer the time span between witnessing an event and recounting it, the more likely a narrator will distort that event. Since oral history accounts are usually given years after the event, it stands to reason that oral historical accounts will not be simple verbal reproductions of that event. Even a beginning student of oral history senses that narrators’ accounts are often flawed. For example, in our interview, French Clark told me that her son Kenneth was born in Maryville, Tennessee, but in the family history questionnaire she later completed with her daughter’s help, she noted Kenneth ’s birthplace as Detroit, Michigan. I was subsequently able to confirm that Kenneth was born in Michigan by checking with the family. Mrs. Clark was mistaken in her interview. This is a minor example of a factual error in oral history interviews but a useful one in drawing our attention to some of the challenges of using oral history as a historical source. In order to understand why oral histories contain inaccuracies, it is useful to examine psychologists’ most recent theories about the ways human beings construct memories. Neuropsychologists studying the way the brain receives memory have found that the brain does not receive memories passively but rather interprets the incoming data.3 In other words, rather than merely recording the events perceived by a person’s senses, the brain seeks to make sense of those events by connecting them with things the individual already knows. Thus, memories are being assigned meaning as they arrive in the brain, and the brain stores those memories in an organized fashion by connecting them with similar knowledge and memories already stored in the brain. The brain also does not organize the memory of a single event as a unified whole; rather, discrete pieces of that memory are stored in the brain and may be connected to disparate series of other memories.4 When the brain is asked to recall a particular memory, it does not recall an exact recording of the event. Instead, it recalls the interpreted event and some of the related knowledge or memories to which it was connected in the brain. As psychologist John Kotre put it, “When we recollect, the brain literally re-collects [emphasis his] all neural events that took place on a prior occasion.” To make matters more complicated, as...

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